As the Superintendent of the Middle Country Schools, LI – Roberta Gould – said recently, “We strongly believe there is no correlation between these latest assessment results and our students’ ability to be college-and-career-ready.

Five states have not signed on to Common Core and, unsurprisingly, they share 95% of the same standards as the core but they don’t destroy kids’ self-image with inadequate standardized testing nor do they have a plan to nationalize education.

Common Core has their own website you can go to read the standards.

If you want to determine the age-appropriateness of them, first check out Kindergarten.

The Core ‘experts’ expect kindergarteners to ‘Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing’ by the second half of kindergarten.

Just the use of the word ‘command’ in relation to a five-year old shows their cluelessness and ineptitude.

They start out expecting them to ‘Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking’ by the first half of kindergarten.

By 2014, kindergarten children in New York will be subjected to testing on the many age-inapproriate concepts they have been taught.

Soon, it will be the nation’s kindergarteners since 45 states have signed on to it.

You get the idea. Kindergarten just isn’t fun any more.

None of the grades will be fun. High school children taking the regents next year will be required to respond to the standards though they haven’t been exposed to them since kindergarten. They will then have to use these same test results to gain entrance to college.

It should lead to higher dropout rates and a federally-controlled educational system, something that is outlawed in our Constitution. It takes all local control away from local communities. It takes control away from teachers, whom the CORE people obviously don’t trust.

The Core makes all children learn pretty much the same things at the same time. It’s a one-size-fits-all education. Anyone who has more than one child, knows that won’t work. All children are different. This program allows little time for creativity, flexibility, or the prompting and support they give lip-service to.

Where did the Core come from? It came from corporations. They like to say it came from the National Governors’ Association because it makes it sound like governors devised it. Only one problem, the association is comprised of trade organizations.

That’s right, corporations like Intel, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, GE, IBM and Microsoft devised and funded Common Core with help from Race to the Top monies (the Stimulus).

Corporations – billionaires – forced it into existence with money! They bought the governors. Corporations are looking out for themselves and their future global work pool of cheap labor.

One of those corporations is Microsoft, which is the biggest H1V Visa employer. They hire foreign workers because they say US workers aren’t as knowledgeable or as competent, when in fact, they really mean they are not cheap labor! They also don’t like the unions, who often use bully tactics themselves.

Are you sick and tired yet of hearing that US workers are lazy and don’t do a good job? I know I am.

Corporations know nothing about the educational system, so why are we letting them and their crony political friends take over our educational system, a system that works for most children?

Everything gets blamed on the schools and all the burdens of failure are placed on the schools when the biggest problem – not the only – is the home and peer pressure. Corporations that fund bad ethics in music, movies, and clothing also deserve blame.

Bill Gates, one of the big funders of this, said that we need more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) students. He’s lying.

Half of the STEM graduates are currently unemployed. Why would he lie? Because he gets a larger pool of cheap labor!

The focus is on STEM to the point that it is detrimental to students who are not STEM oriented.

As an educator, I always knew the limited value of standardized testing, which I have used as a general measure of performance. They are linear and static but learning and information is not always linear and it’s never static. Core proponents claim to be teaching creative thinking when they are teaching only skills. There is little room for creativity.

Publishing companies stand to make billions off the new books and videos the districts will have to buy.

The teachers will be evaluated on these ineffective measures, making their evaluations meaningless, to say nothing of the fact that some of the best teachers take on the worst-performing students.

Reportedly, two years of poor teacher performance based in part on these tests could lead to dismissal and the CORE people want to count this year’s testing!

The tests were designed to fail. As Commissioner King declared, 70% of the children will fail. He was right. The tests were designed to do just that.

The children failed dramatically everywhere in New York, one of the first states to take blood money from the government to implement it.

We know that the tests were planned to fail by the Commissioner’s reaction as well as his initial warning.

What did our Commissioner do after the horrendous test results poured in? Did he fix the testing? No, of course not!

He went to corporations and had them sign a pledge to the Common Core.

Check it out:

Commissioner King, a Charter School educator, is threatening to take over the Buffalo School system already. What do you think he will do with it since he is a Charter School advocate? I think he will turn it over to his cronies in the charter school world to make it into a money maker where they will get paid large salaries with taxpayer money and get to call themselves non-profits.

I spoke with a local high school principal – a principal of a prestigious public school on Long Island. He said that no one thinks the Common Core is any good. He said the testing has devastated the children, not only the weaker students, but the better students as well.

He said that they were all afraid to speak out because the State Ed Department is their boss. State Ed has made that clear. He said that parents opting-out of tests is bringing the problem to the attention of everyone but he’s afraid because if too many opt-out, the state will put the schools on the list.

The list raises the specter of many frightening possibilities – takeover, micromanaging, humiliation and any other of an array of bully tactics.

This principal said that college professors took the questions and answers on the exams given in the middle schools and have been arguing over which answer is correct. College professors!!!

My take is that the tests were geared for failure. They want to show how miserably public schools have performed. They like to say that we place #38 among the world’s nations.

That statistic omits an important fact. The nations of the world don’t educate their poor and therefore, they are not included in their scores. They also don’t include their handicapped students while the US makes their handicapped sit through these tests. The Core people are comparing apples to oranges.

The principal I spoke with said that any student who opts-out has to be brought into the principal’s office to be ‘counseled’ – as if the kids will get that.

My answer to that is MORE students have to opt-out so the Commissioner can’t take over every school. Parents will have to explain to children what the ‘counseling’ is about!

The principal said he couldn’t have his own 7th grade child opt-out but he’s NOT planning to show her the test results. He cares too much about her and she is a very good student.

There will be a massive data collection program that goes with this program. They will follow your children from grades kindergarten through high school. Every infraction will be put in the record. Every place your child goes will have every piece of information about your child including their hobbies, mistakes, and every bad grade. They will know a lot about you too.

There is one thing you all should focus on. You are losing your liberty! Right, left, middle, all of you, you are losing your right to control your child’s education. New York is well on its way in a race to the bottom. Watch us and weep!

Check out the website for the author of The Children of the Core and Uncommon @thechalk face.com for good information from a teacher’s point of view.

1 COMMENT

Common Core is designed to destroy self confidence, motivation, and actual learning. Its true intent is the very foundation of evil. I wish I were joking, but I am dead serious. If any person can not see the actual result of common core, the person must have an IQ of 10. Parties responsible for this atrocity should be held to account for their actions. Common Core = crimes against humanity

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